Sweet Sorghum Winter by Melanie Hill (ACTA Publications, 2025) is a captivating story set in “a Southern landscape of wiregrass, ponds, and pines,” a tale of a woman whose husband dies young; her oldest son a “big boy, who was forever estranged from his father”; the younger son “her little man, who was finding his niche, and her daughter, who was just beginning to blossom.”

The story takes place in rural Georgia in 1939, in the wake of bank and business failures and the debilitating poverty of the Great Depression. Their small town had been a beacon of progress: “Ellenton and someplace in Nebraska were the first two communities
to receive R.E.A. loans. And we even beat ‘em in stringin’ the lines!” young Franklin explains eagerly to his cousin from Atlanta.

But “the Suttons had fallen to their current station in life, leaving the bank and the realty office and their big house in town and ending up in a country farmhouse” after the bank was shuttered in the Depression. The heroine and her husband, Martha Ann and Jimmy, “personally indebted themselves” to guarantee all the deposits held by the family-owned bank were repaid.

The lesson is not one of loss and deprivation, but of faith and confidence, of formidable feminism before the word existed to describe courageous and moral acts. In Georgia’s coldest winter, we see that “faith—quiet, invisible, enduring—lingered. Mother looked at what remained, weighed her strength, and judged it to be more than enough.”

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Martha Ann, with the sturdy resolve of her Baptist faith, feeds the hungry and keeps hope alive. Their tenant sharecroppers provide food to keep the family fed and the sweet books’ title too: “No jelly, chow-chow, pickles, or preserves, but dozens of quarts of sorghum syrup. She tallied a few quarts of green beans and peas, fatback, and three sacks of peanuts.” The young daughter, Audrey surveyed the storehouse and understood: “It was going to be a sorghum winter.”

Still, “Audrey did the math. She computed ten percent of each item and set that aside for the orphans. The Suttons tithed ten percent of their garden to the Georgia Baptist Orphans’ Home in Hapeville. Audrey didn’t just pick out the items that might be considered
surplus; she gave the orphans ten percent of every item."

 

Martha Ann acknowledges that “‘The Lord has carried me these last twelve years, and I will count on Him to see me through the thirteenth year.’ That’s how long it had been since she liquidated the Bank of Ellenton.”

This story makes me want to be a better person. Hill’s writing makes me want to be a better writer. Martha Ann’s spirituality makes me want to be a better Catholic.

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You can find Melanie Hill at her website https://www.melaniehillauthor.com/

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Or purchase a copy of Slow Sorghum Winter at the links below.